Christianity, Crusades, Islam

"On September 11, 2001, there were only a few professional historians of the Crusades in America. I was the one who was not retired. As a result, my phone began ringing and didn’t stop for years. In the hundreds of interviews I have given since that terrible day, the most common question has been, “How did the Crusades lead to the terrorist attacks against the West today?” I always answered: “They did not. The Crusades were a medieval phenomenon with no connection to modern Islamist terrorism.”" (source)

Activismists

""We can't get bogged down in analysis," one activist told us at an anti-war rally in New York last fall, spitting out that last word like a hairball. He could have relaxed his vigilance. This event deftly avoided such bogs, loudly opposing the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan without offering any credible ideas about it (we're not counting the notion that the entire escapade was driven by Unocal and Lockheed Martin, the "analysis" advanced by many speakers). But the moment called for doing something more than brandishing the exact same signs - "Stop the Bombing" and "No War for Oil" - that activists poked skywards during the Gulf War. This latest war called for some thinking, and few were doing much of that. 

So what is the ideology of the activist left (and by that we mean the global justice, peace, media democracy, community organizing, financial populist, and green movements)? Socialist? Mostly not - too state-phobic. Some actvisits are anarchists - but mainly out of temperamental reflex, not rigorous thought. Others are liberals - though most are too confrontational and too skeptical about the system to embrace that label. And many others profess no ideology at all. So over all is the activist left just an inchoate, "post-ideological" mass of do-gooders, pragmatists and puppeteers? 

No. The young troublemakers of today do have an ideology and it is as deeply felt and intellectually totalizing as any of the great belief systems of yore. The cadres who populate those endless meetings, who bang the drum, who lead the "trainings" and paint the puppets, do indeed have a creed. They are Activismists.

That's right, Activismists. This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hyper-mediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous. The activistists seem to borrow their philosophy from the factory boss in a Heinrich Boll short story who greets his employees each morning with the exhortation "Let's have some action." To which the workers obediently reply: "Action will be taken!"" (source)

Roundup

Trust In The Machine

On Appreciation of a Roll

The Courage to Disobey

What is Harmony?

The Abyss of Violence

The Science of Wisdom

On 'Acrobatism' and Systema

'Exhale Into Yourself'

On Flow

Hold Your Breath

Learning, Performance, and Competition in Systema

Moments in the History of Systema - On Watchfulness and Holiness

Heart Rate Variability and Breath Training

The Anatomy of Violence

What I Learned in Italy

The Voice

10,000 Hours?

Eat and Run

"You Could Fight One of Us or Both of Us"

Responsibility

Illusion

100% of Your 50%

The Gaze

The Grip

To Sojourn

Partners

The Circle

Definitions (Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

Breath-Holding

David Luban - Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

"But the pressure of liberalism will compel them to think about it in a highly stylized and artificial way, what I will call the 'liberal ideology of torture.' The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by looming catastrophe, with no tincture of cruelty; that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense; and that, because of the associations of torture with the horrors of yesteryear, perhaps one should not even call harsh interrogation 'torture.'
 And the liberal ideology will crystalize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb."(source)

Grip Redux

"The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force’."  (Source)

In this sentence, taken totally out of context, ideology is about grip. It's about grabbing minds and holding them. It is about the grip of ideas. From now on I'm going to try to replace the word ideology with 'grip of ideas' and see if it makes the world more intelligible. I want to see how and when it grips. And what the nature of this grip is. One can look at ideas themselves and pull them apart and think about what it is within an idea that enables it to grip the mind. To grip minds. But what is the mechanism at work in itself ? What is the grip?

And how does that grip transform minds into an active material substance? Is this where the rubber hits the road for historians of ideas? Should we all become historians of the grip and the mass? 

With answers to these questions we could possibly address the more pressing issue. How do we loosen the grip and dissolve the mass? How do we think without ideology?